The Backrooms - Everything Must Go, and Go, and Go
Detail of Cap’n Clark’s Tee (backside). Image sourced from A24 shop
The Backrooms director, Kane Parsons, has cited the video game Portal 2 as his biggest inspiration.[1] The online community that has sprung up around the Backrooms is obsessed with dreaming up new “levels”. Even the anonymous 4chan post that inspired the whole phenomena uses the term “noclip”.[2] It is fitting then that the film, inspired by an urban legend steeped in video game and internet sensibilities, has already been re-released with bonus content. But conceptually, Backrooms draws from much more than just video games, whether Parsons knows it or not.
An earlier, analogous online collaborative fiction project, the SCP Foundation, also originated on 4chan.[3] It centres around an organisation called the Foundation, a sort of ultra-powerful research-prison-military body that works in secret to (ostensibly) protect the public from paranormal threats. It, like the Portal franchise, emerged at the tailend of the Bush era, a time characterised by fears of “alien” destructive incursions into the quotidian and of the unchecked expansion of an omnipotent surveillance state[4] (think “war on terror” islamophobic hysteria, Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib…).
Parsons’ mysterious organisation, ASYNC, no doubt draws from the Foundation[5], but I was surprised how much his particular vision was indebted to one particular article: SCP 3008, an infinitely large IKEA populated by violent, disfigured approximations of the retailer’s staff members. It’s a play on the popular internet joke about getting lost in said big-box store, but also clearly informed by concerns with the proliferation of mass-produced junk. Were it not for the inspired decision to give Clark’s store the pirate/Ottoman Empire theme, I’d think these parallels too striking.[6]
But unlike the sprawling subterranean “sites” of the Foundation, or the Aperture Science “facility” of Portal, which are, though complex, designed with intent, the Backrooms are purposeless. In 2007, there existed a dominant narrative and counternarrative – both supposing that there was somebody truly in charge of the world (be it Bush, Cheney, the CIA…), disagreeing only on whether that was a good thing. But the Backrooms came to prominence (without wishing to sound like a Guardian writer) post-COVID-outbreak, in a world where the limits of understanding are drawn by opaque, proprietary algorithms; whose public spaces are homogenised and rendered unfamiliar in naked subservience to capital; whose governments operate more and more in a mode of irrational cruelty and expansionism in service of market forces that even the most steadfast Friedmanites would have to admit they do not understand – all diligently sidestepped by a terminally backwards-facing culture industry.
Parsons’ film, through the interiority-less[7] co-protagonist Mary’s (Renate Reinsve’s) tedious dialogue, insists that the Backrooms are an extension of the characters’ memories/psyches, but this reading is undermined by his decision to set the film in 1990 (to justify the diegetic VHS degradation[8]). The Backrooms are eerie not just because they are warped, but because they are abandoned and preserved, disjoint from our time. The characters in Backrooms are not unsettled by the space’s fluorescent lights and wan wallpaper because it is contemporaneous to them. For its core audience, the Backrooms are haunted by a “lost world” of American “prosperity” from before they were born; for Clark, it is merely an impossible extension of his store. Backrooms, though, wants to have it both ways: the space and its inhabitants are very clearly inspired by glitches and rendering errors, but the characters, existing before the widespread adoption of digital cameras and 3D graphics, lack the language to properly describe them, and so must lean on the tortured “draw a dog” analogy.
Parsons’ found-footage YouTube films, though marred by their unembodied monsters,[9] are a purer distillation of the Backrooms,[10] because they are experiments in form, primarily interested in visceral experience. He has spoken about his desire to expand Backrooms into a feature anthology, each featuring new “characters” and, presumably, new entities and noncontemporary styles of decor. This burgeoning franchise, in which westerners, seemingly at random, are confined inside a blank, unintelligible space, pursued by senseless abominations and out-of-control agents of capital will be the perfect cinematic accompaniment to the coming American hegemonic collapse, with all its attendant repression and confusion, precisely because Parsons, for all his visual and tension-building talent, is unable to articulate precisely what the Backrooms mean.
And so, in the sequel, I expect a new white woman (a grieving mother) to fall into, given the dinner scene’s explicit reveal of a food source,[11] a survival-gameified Backrooms, and much like in SCP-3008, be saved from a monster by a group of long-term survivors (played by marketable actors in 80s fashion). They’ll have formed a rudimentary society; their leader will be a charming Black man with whom the woman will bond (platonically); there will be a defiant, vulnerable, non-white-but-non-Black, non-binary-coded child for her to foster,[12] but their settlement will collapse due to ASYNC’s greed… The white woman will learn to stop being such a Debbie Downer, the child will find salvation in their nuclear chosen family, and the Black man will have to sacrifice himself. Duplass’ character will quote Mark Fisher and be eaten by a monster after a Brian Eno needledrop. Mary will cameo, to set up her return at the halfway point of Backrooms 3: Core Memories, where she’ll think about Clark confront a stand-in for her mother, and escape the Backrooms and ASYNC for good (leaving Reinsve free to star in Villeneuve’s (songless) Crying of Lot 49). A child who has not yet been born will be greenlit to direct LEGO Backrooms Origins: The First Door. But, and most importantly, there will be lots of weird-looking rooms, and A24 might even let Parsons shoot some of them on tape.
References and footnotes
[1] In fact, one of his very first short films available on YouTube is a Portal 2 fan film.
[2] To pass through a solid surface out of bounds, into an area not intended to be seen by the player.
[3]It’s quite charming how poorly the original post was written.
[4] A popular in-universe phrase attributed to the Foundation, “We Die in the Dark, so You Can Live in the Light’, would be apt as the motto for the Department of Homeland Security.
[5] Especially during the bonus footage, which is as pure an adaptation of the dry testing logs from the early SCPs as I can imagine.
[6] And the fact that in 2024, it was discovered that the original Backrooms picture was taken in 2002 at a former furniture store. https://comicbook.com/movies/news/the-backrooms-lost-media-identified-original-creepypasta-photo/
[7] A symptom of the Portal influence?
[8] It’s clear that he would prefer to give the “tape look” to all the footage, but was constrained by the need to make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. The film would be better if he had committed fully to crafting a nightmarish textural experience, like Skinamarink, but of course then it would have made no money, like Skinamarink.
[9] I can’t stress enough how much I love that they made the big scary villain a pirate.
[10] Despite the complaints of certain subsections of Backrooms fans that they do not follow their preferred “lore”.
[11] He should have made her eat it.
[12] Others have talked more eloquently about Backrooms’ more-than-uncomfortable racial politics, for example: https://open.substack.com/pub/notfuturistic/p/the-backrooms-is-not-a-bad-film-which?r=5cj1ec&utm_medium=ios